This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Matt Dunn has written seven novels, has been shortlisted for several awards including the Romantic Novel of the Year Award, and his eighth novel, What Might Have Been, is out now. Here he tells Novelicious how a copy of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, given to him on a skiing holiday, changed his life.
I was 12 years old when I decided I was going to be a comedy writer, though it took another twenty-odd years (though if they hadn’t been odd, I wouldn’t have had anything to write about) until a book someone gave me actually made that possible.
Every week at school, someone from our class would be given the opportunity (though ‘picked on’ was more how we saw it) by our teacher to write a report of the most recent cricket/rugby/hockey game we'd played, which would then be read out by said child in front of the whole school (a process so scary it sometimes caused voices to break mid-piece) during assembly. Typically, these reports tended to be pretty dull (“they scored, then we did, then they scored again…”), demonstrating all the literary flair you'd expect spotty, pubescent schoolboys to have, but when it came to my turn, I decided to try to liven mine up a little by putting a couple of jokes in (I'd repeat them here, but of course, you had to be there. And 12. And, possibly, know the kids who were the butt of those jokes). Anyway, to my amazement and delight, I got a few laughs, and while in retrospect those laughs might have been because my flies were undone, the effect was hypnotic. There and then I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
The only problem for this budding comedy writer was what kind of comedy to actually write, so while I tried to work that out, I decided I might as well finish school, go to college, then get a job (or, to use my mum’s definition, “a 'proper' job, as opposed to making rubbish up in the vain hope someone might buy it, and how do you expect to ever get married and give me the grandchildren I’m so desperate for if you haven’t got any money” etc. etc.). And so my dream career was forgotten about, until …Years later, I was on a skiing holiday, and had what I can only describe as an epiphany when a friend passed me his copy of Nick Hornby's first novel, High Fidelity. I read it in almost one sitting (it's still my favourite book, and I regularly re-read it, or dip in and out whenever I want inspiration, or to see how each of his perfectly-constructed sentences/paragraphs/chapters/set pieces just works), refused to give it back, then read it again. And when I got back home, I sat down at my laptop, cracked my knuckles, and began what would become my first novel (which would get me a publishing deal, and set me on the path towards becoming a full-time writer), Best Man.
So there you have it. In a two-star hotel halfway up a mountain in Italy, a borrowed copy of High Fidelity literally (see what I did there?) changed my life, as it made me realise that that was what I wanted to write, or at least, how I wanted to write.
Eight novels later (my latest, What Might Have Been, has just been published), I'm still trying.